Downloads for Season 9 winner Lee DeWyze and runner-up Crystal Bowersox are about half those of last season's Kris Allen and Adam Lambert.

By Brian Mansfield Special for, USA TODAY

If Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox hope to sell as much music as American Idol stars from years past, they have some catching up to do.

Season 9's Idol champ and runner-up sold about 400,000 downloads last week, with nine of their tracks ranked among the week's 200 most popular downloads, according to preliminary data from Nielsen SoundScan.

"It's about half the sales total of Kris Allen and Adam Lambert following the finale last year," says Nielsen Entertainment vice president Chris Muratore. Top finishers Allen and Lambert placed 25 songs in the top 200 during the 2009 finale week.

DeWyze's official debut single, a cover of U2's Beautiful Day, was the top-selling Idol track, moving nearly 100,000 copies, according to SoundScan's preliminary information. That's 25% less than Allen did last year with his "coronation" song, No Boundaries.

Four other DeWyze songs were among the top 200: Hallelujah, The Boxer, Everybody Hurts and Simple Man. Bowersox had three: Up to the Mountain, Black Velvet and Me and Bobby McGee. Their duet of Falling Slowly also made the chart.

The Fox show that aired after Idol on Tuesdays seems to have stolen its sales thunder. Preliminary SoundScan numbers place 11 songs from Glee in the top 200. And though Idol contestants didn't crack iTunes' top 10 last week, the Glee cast did, with its version of Lady Gaga's Poker Face.

Songs still get a sales boost from being performed on Idol. On average, downloads for the original versions of songs performed by the Idols increased at least 100% the week after the show. Shania Twain, who mentored contestants when they sang her songs, saw the greatest increase in her catalog — more than 700%.

Live viewership of the Idol finale fell from 24.4 million in 2009 to 20.1 million this year, with the largest drop (29%) in the Southeast, a traditional Idol ratings stronghold, perhaps for lack of a Southern contender.

"This year, the Northeast had the largest audience that watched the show live" with 4.4 million viewers, Muratore says. "That wasn't the case last year."

Between Week 1 of the final rounds and last week's performances, Bowersox generated the largest amount of online chatter, followed closely by Siobhan Magnus and DeWyze. Not all of that buzz was good: Bowersox and DeWyze had the highest positive sentiment, followed by third- and fourth-place finishers Casey James and Michael Lynche.

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